Customer Reviews

Daft Club [Vinyl]

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

The reason this CD made me so mad, is that i was expecting so much from it.

Homework is one of my favorite albums of all time, and Discovery blew my mind when i first heard it.

Both get listened to all the time.

Areodynamite is decent. Neptunes remix is CRAP. Basement Jaxx remix (and this made me REALLY upset, as the B-Jaxx are ANOTHER one of my favs) is CRAP. The remix of Digital Love is basically Digital Love with a couple added drums and extended parts. Same song. Slum Village remix was okay. Unplugged remix of One More Time is a joke. It has to be.

I dont remember any other song as being even noteworthy.

It breaks my heart, but this CD is definately not worth owning.

Daft Punk is one of my all time favorites. Their 4 singles and video series for them were genius and amazing, but 3 stars was probably generous for this cd because it disappointed me a little. I'm still confused about whether they are treating this as "a new album" since it was so marketed in the US (unlike Alive 1997). If they are, it was a dissapointment, if it was meant to be a bunch of extended, clublike versions of their previous songs, then it's alright. Dont get me wrong, the only new songs on the album, Ouverture and Aerodynamite are great and distinct style like Discovery Daft Punk, but the club mixes and experimental songs I could do without. Parts of the club mixes are great, but they repeat and run on like an average techno song, something I've never known Daft Punk for. The American influence is clear on this album too with the presence of rap on the Neptunes Remix and Slum Village. Both songs are terrible and I try to forget that Aerodynamic was destroyed and rap put over it. I also have to mention that the Romanthony Version of One More Time is possibly the worst song I ever heard, and I'm quite surprised its even on the cd with how bad the singing is. Artists change, but this wasnt change, it just kinda seemed like they were trying to get you to spend money. To top it off, I thought I'd finally have access to their website (only people who buy their cds can go there) and when I loaded the cd it took me to a webpage advertising their Interstella 5555 figurines, forcing me to sign up for some advertising scheme for it. Kinda disappointed but Im trying to tell myself this was just to hold us over for now.

Not very good. Not nearly what it could have been. There are maybe 4 good tracks on the whole cd. The rest are complete crap. It pains me to write this review because I'm a huge fan, but I haven't even had this cd for a day and I'm already tired of it.

I'm a Daft Punk fan, like other people. When I first bought the CD, I thought it would be remixes from both "Homework" and "Discovery". Boy, was I wrong! It repeats themselves after Track 2. Most of the songs (such as Aerodynamic, Digital Love, and Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger) are from "Discovery", while only one song, (Phoenix) is from "Homework". And the Enhanced CD sucks! It just has the cover on "Discovery" on there, and it takes you on the website for their mailing list for Action Figures from the anime movie, Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. Daft Punk, love your music, but next time you want to do a remix album, please include "Homework" Tracks!

There's a reason why some songs are made available only over the Internet, and it's not because they're too good for ordinary record buyers. These guest remixes might have made for nice freebies , but they don't add up to much of an album. While the 2001 source record, Discovery, struck a balance between dance-floor mechanics and prog-disco kitsch, the remixers here opt for either/or, so Boris Dlugosch's "Digital Love" is humdrum house and Gonzales's "Too Long" is fantastic gimmickry. Only the Neptunes stand between Daft Club and utter irrelevance. They reconstitute "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" as offbeat digital soul built around a nagging synth line and Pharrell Williams's great falsetto. Not for the first time, they're easily the best thing about a good record.

That's what I did. This album in particular had the potential to become something more than what it is.

To be honest, many of the songs included are okay. Here's a list of the included tracks:

Daft Club includes:

Ouverture

Aerodynamic (Daft Punk Remix)

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (The Neptunes Remix)

Face to Face (Cosmo Vitelli Remix)

Phoenix (Basement Jaxx Remix)

Digital Love (Boris Dlugosch Remix)

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Jess & Crabbe Remix)

Face to Face (Demon Remix)

Crescendolls (Laidback Luke Remix)

Aerodynamic (Slum Village Remix)

Too Long (Gonzales Version)

Aerodynamite

One More Time (Romanthony's Unplugged)

Something About Us (Love Theme from Interstella 5555)

Now, I have a bone to pick with 3 tracks in particular. The remix of Digital Love by Boris Dlugosch just do not work for me. If you have not listened to it, it's basically an extended version of the original, with maybe a couple differences. The Aerodynamic remix by Slum Village basically raps on top of a slowed version of Aerodynamic. The song isn't bad, but the guys singing just sound bored, unreal and not into what they are doing. Finally, the remix of Phoenix by Basement Jaxx, just left me stunned....in a bad way. I do not know what I COULD compare it to, but you listen to it for yourself and decide.

The rest, is history. Tracks "Aerodynamite" and "Ouverture" may be the best tracks on this CD. In my opinion, the best remixes on the album are BOTH "Face" to Face" remixes, by Cosmo Vitelli and Demon. They both just seem to me that they had a lot of time and patience put into them, I wouldn't know that because i did not produce them.

Another bonus is "Something about us", which is taken directly from Discovery.

If I had to give my opinion of this entire album in general, I'd say to go out and buy it you're building a collection of Daft Punk memorabilia. I ended up buying this in the two-pack that came with Human after all. It's not a bad album, but out of the goodness of my heart, I have to give it 3/5 stars. It doesn't appeal to everyone, but just try to listen to it a couple of times and it may grow on you.

Daft Club begins with a superb opener, the appropriately titled "Ouverture", filled with brilliant sounding chords backed by a subdued house beat and a ghostly sounding vocoder voice. It'd be nice to think that this piece sets the stage for the rest of the album, but sadly, it does not. Following it is Daft Punk's remix of their own track "Aerodynamic", and as much as I'd love to say this remix is awesome, it simply isn't. It basically sounds like nothing more than a slightly altered version of the original with vocals from "One More Time" tacked onto it. Its a let down for sure, but at least half of Daft Club is. Basement Jaxx's remix of "Phoenix" goes nowhere fast for eight minutes, Boris Dlugosch does little more than paste the beats from "Fresh" into his remix of "Digital Love", and Romanthony destroys "One More Time" with whats not even a remix, but an acoustic cover. What the heck happened here? Its hard to say. It feels like Daft Punk's presence isn't even here in the production of these remixes. There are a few remixes here that I can honestly not speak negatively about, but even those might be disliked by others. The Neptunes' remix of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is fair, but it gets a little carried away when entirely new lyrics are thrown in and make the track feel more like a new song altogether. Slum Village doesn't really even remix "Aerodynamic" during their turn on the album. Its a fair effort, but hearing them rap over samples from Aerodynamic feels more like a hip-hop song rather than a remix. The same could be said of Gonzale's R&B cover of "Too Long". Again, another fair effort, but it only adds to the lack of focus here alongside Slum Village. The track I found to be the best was the Demon Remix of "Face to Face". I can imagine that this is what the original would likely have sounded like had it been from Homework. By using short, chopped pieces from the original repeating over a new synth that fades in, its really the only remix here I felt packed the energy that the rest should have, but didn't. Overall though, the idea of a Daft Punk remix album sounds great in theory, but as most of Daft Club's resulting tracks show, its far more engaging to hear Daft Punk remix other artists than to hear other artists remix Daft Punk.

I'm a electronica music lover and for the past six months I've become a Daft Punk fan. Excellent music, and I also am a big fan of Matthew Dear and Deadmau5, I might add. All excellent. In any case, I recently became aware of "Daft Club," a collection of Daft Punk remixes by a variety of artists and decided to give it a try.

The Daft Club disc is an interesting recording. It's somewhat mellow, pleasant and easy listening. If you look at the listing of the songs you will notice that some songs are listed several times. Don't be concerned at all. Not only do the remixes not sound like the originals, the remixes with the same title don't sound like one another. Most of the songs don't particularly sound much like Daft Punk, but here and there Daft Punk lines make their unmistakable sonic appearance. It would be my opinion that a Daft Punk fan might like the recording and find it interesting and amusing. However, from my own point of view, I'd rather listen to Daft Punk unremixed. Or if you want some interesting and provocative remixing, try listening to the "Alive 2007" disc.

One interesting remix is "Phoenix" by Basement Jaxx. Some time ago I reviewed a CD by Basement Jaxx ("Kish Kash") and didn't particularly like it because the sound was "muddy", contained a lot of extraneous noises and sounded as if the recording was being played through a thick foam rubber wall. Well, the Basement Jaxx remix sounds much the same way. Go figure.

Perhaps I should indicate that I don't particularly care for remixes in general. In almost all cases the original recording is best. However, this is not at all a bad recording and a lot of Daft Punk fans might enjoy it. Some might hate it also, I should add.

Gary Peterson

Daft Punk's Discovery gets put through the ringer by some house and hip-hop luminaries. The resulting album, Daft Club, shows a wild range --- lots of fun. The Neptunes turn "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" into a R&B track, while Basement Jaxx throw whatever sonic debris they can get their hands (from Arabic horn samples to vocal squeals) into their mix of "Phoenix." Boris Dlugosh, however, doesn't do much for "Digital Love." Both Demon and Laidback Luke deliver harder versions of "Face To Face" and "Crescendolls" respectively, but the Slum Village version of Aerodynamic minimizes the wonderful baroque chords and maximizes not-so-wonderful broke rhymes. And just in case you didn't get enough of "One More Time," there's an acoustic version. Definitely a mixed bag of a remix album, but still worth checking out.

Although I nearly dropped my CD player after the 1st song (modem screeching), the songs blend beautifully. Like the previous poster, the rap songs did not appeal to this listener. A pretty good remix of Daft Punk's music. Worth the price!